So you dream of a motorcycle

It started with a sexy next-year sportbike model that caught your eye online or in the street. You started wanting one badly. Generally the black one.

2011 Ducati 848 Evo
2011 Ducati 848 Evo

You suddenly began noticing and hearing every motorcycle in the street, and with time your plans started shaping up. But then so did your thought process. You started “getting real”!

What if you get married and make ~40 babies? Even now, you already have a family that needs to be driven somewhere every now and then. You couldn’t ride your mom to a hair saloon on a motorcycle now, could you? Of course not!

More than the need to drive them around is the need to convince them you are going to ride. Of course, you could do that! You have the authority, you are self–sufficient and your word matters! But you calm yourself down — it’s just too much hassle… you respect your elders, you don’t wanna make daddy a sad panda!

Afterall, you also need to haul around some luggage sometimes. Heavy suitcases, personal computers, pillows, blankets, construction materials, livestock and nuclear warheads.

What about the winter? You can’t ride a motorcycle in the winter! Argh!

And you want to be safe. You want to be able to make mistakes. Airbags and crash tests!

Comfort is important to you. Who doesn’t like the good familiar bass line streaming out of the subwoofer, along with the flow of hot or cool air? Climate control! You want to be able to control the climate around you!

The apparel. What, you’ll need to purchase and wear special equipment to ride? But you love wearing your slippers out!

You love vehicle maintenance! Greasy hands are sexy in the music videos! But seriously, changing your oil and the brake pads, cleaning your carburetor and configuring the clutch, that’s more effort than watching a video!

The motorcycle has no doors. I mean of course, you’ve seen it has no doors, but whew — really? No doors? What if someone steals it? These are hard times we’re living in!

Then of course the parts! No motorcycle is an Opel Vectra, where would you order the parts? UK? USA? You get online for that? Uh!

How much fuel per 100 kilometers? 7 liters? Hey that’s almost like a car! I mean, my friend’s Cherokee burns only like 14! Nah, not when he’s pushing it of course. Still!

Finally comes the neighbor who knows someone who knows someone else who has heard of someone’s relative telling about his wife’s colleague’s lover’s neighbor dying in a motorcycle accident in 1981 on an unknown motorcycle. “I mean, the brains were all over the place!” he adds. The other neighbor confirms his words with a thoughtful nod.

And so you buy a car. Something reasonably aged, but not too old. Something you can convince yourself and the others is the coolest car one could ever own. You’re certainly planning to travel with it just as you would travel on a motorcycle, so you make sure it has a 4WD differential lock and throw in a sleeping bag into the trunk. “2011 X6?? Are you fucking kidding me? I would never ever ever change my 2001 Toyota RAV4 for that shit! My car is truly offroad and totally stylish, while X6 is just a pile of junk for wussies! I mean you can’t even ride X6 on worn tarmac, let alone gravel! Who buys that shit?! It doesn’t even look that good!” Some around you argue. Some nod. What matters is your feeling of self–righteousness.

Toyota RAV4
Toyota RAV4

 

BMW X6
BMW X6

Of course, you will get a motorcycle. Someday. Now is a little tense, financially. The stock market is going down. It is just not the right time.

You pick a date that is reasonably far away not to require any actions today, but sounds close nevertheless. Sounds to who? To yourself of course! Two or three years. Then it’ll be yours. You pick a model out of the blue — say, a Triumph Rocket III. There’s a dude standing in the promo poster that totally looks like what you would want to look.

2010 Triumph Rocket III Roadster

“This shit is my favorite motorcycle!”, you tell your friends. Of course you’ve never even seen one on TV, just the Internet. “2,300 cubic centimeters! That’s 2,3 liters in the car slang! But I can totally speak cc’s!” You learn all the specifications of this motorcycle by heart and set it as your wallpaper for a couple of weeks, before the next cool game comes out or the next awesome abstract wallpaper is published on DeviantArt.

It is pretty much sealed — you will probably never ride.

Traffic Police, Story Two

Riding home from the Rock Bar, after a friend’s birthday party, 4AM, drunk as all hell.

Speeding to quickly get to the destination and to avoid getting caught. The traffic police patrol car spots me at the beginning of Baghramyan and pulls me over. I don’t stop and keep riding along Baghramyan towards my home, with the hope that the policemen would give up on pursuing a motorcycle right away. The dudes seem tough; they put on the siren and start a pursuit. I cross the Baghramyan/Proshyan intersection under a red light, speeding somewhere around 130km/h, ride across the Barekamutyun bridge, and check my mirrors. The cops don’t appear to be there, and I no longer hear the siren or see the flashing lights. Looks like they’ve lost me. “Losers!”. I ride on. On the intersection of Komitas/Papazian, I turn left and — boom — smash my front wheel straight into the right door of the police car that was pursuing me! I barely hold the motorcycle. The policeman behind the door puts the window down, looking at me in awe, speechless.

“Hi!” I go on, looking straight into the guy’s eyes with a nervous smile on my face.

“Stop at the right side of the street!!” the other guy screams into the mike.

“Can I stop at the left side? I’m going to Papazian street, that’s where my home is.”

“STOP AT THE RIGHT SIDE!!” yells the policeman.

“Aye, officer”

I pull the motorcycle over to the right, get off. The guys are extremely pissed. The one with the higher rank runs towards me and goes on enumerating, hardly catching his breath:

“You refused to stop at a traffic police officer’s demand, you ran away from the traffic police, you crossed a red light, rode on the opposite lane, more than twice exceeded the speed limit for riding in a residential area, you smashed into our goddamn door, and I can already feel standing here that you are drunk! Do you even imagine what kind of a fine are you going to pay?!”

“I’m sorry officer, I didn’t see that you pulled me over!”

“Are you kidding me? You’re lying! You saw us stopping you and you rode away, jumping under the red light!”

“Did I? I thought it was yellow!”

“It was red, and you’re lying! Now tell me that you didn’t realize you were riding on the opposite lane!”

“I didn’t!”

“You’re lying!”

“OK officer, what now?”

“Now I’m taking away your driving license, and you’re gonna have to pay enormous fines! Look at our door!”

“Please sir, it was really late and I just wanted to get home quickly! How about we solve this otherwise?”

“What’s your occupation?” the officer looks inquisitive

“I’m a student!” (Rubik says that this always works with the police. They start pitying you because of your social standing and income. But the officer didn’t buy that.)

“You’re a student riding a brand new 2009 Honda CBF? You’re lying!!”

“Uh sir, how about I just give you all the contents of my wallet and we part?” I take out my wallet.

“How much have you got in there?”

“Well I only have 5,000 drams!”

The officer looks in my eyes suspiciously for a second, then goes on: “Deal, you’re gonna give us all the contents of your wallet. Except we’re gonna check your wallet ourselves!”

He grabs the wallet from my hands, opens it… and takes all ~70,000 drams that I have in it.

“Some twisted goddamn asshole you are!” he mumbles, walking back to his car.

Disclaimer: this story does not represent my personality in any way. Honest!

Safety disclaimer: this story is fictional. I mean, what’s with the filing a lawsuit shit?!

Resume

Finally, after an enormously long break, I am back to motorcycling and of course my blog. After some storm, everything is getting back to amazing — and this certainly includes my life as well as the weather. I am back to my life and motorcycling with great ideas, great plans and great hopes. Some of these are so great that I contemplate and breathe them every minute of my daily routine. My following posts will cover these. The winter was relatively grim, as it is for every motorcyclist, but the perspective looks brighter than ever from where I stand.

And oh I already took my bike out of the winter storage. Riding in Yerevan, on February 17th. The air was chilly but the overall experience wasn’t as bad as during my last riding day on December 3rd. Only 76 days of not riding a motorcycle during the entire year in Armenia. How cool is that?!

Sweet Gloves

Spilled a whole glass of Coca-Cola with ice on my brilliant Spidi gloves from Italy (:*) while dining. The gloves have the “do not wash in any way” sign. Luckily no coke got inside of the gloves. However, they’re now sticking to the handlebar. Gross. Damn it.

On the other hand, now I have a bullet-proof argument as to why exactly I think my leather gloves are so sweet! Take that!